French Late-Style Femininity and American Feminism

Bethany Ladimer. Colette, Beauvoir, and Duras: Age and Women Writers. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. x + 235 pp. ISBN 0-8130-1700-9 (cl).

Bethany Ladimer's impressive Colette, Beauvoir, and Duras is an outstanding contribution to one of our most pressing projects today: the creation of a collective feminist consciousness of the prospects and problems of older women. Sidonie-Gabriele Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, and Marguerite Duras: these three extraordinary women lived long and prolific lives as influential writers. Colette, who lived to be eighty-one, died in 1954. Both Beauvoir and Duras died in 1986; Duras was eighty-one, Beauvoir seventy-eight. All three, Ladimer shows, invented ways of living into old age that were not part of the cultural script in France. Isabelle de Courtivron, also a scholar of French literature, has argued that there are significant differences between how French women and American women approach aging. "French women tend to wax poetic, fatalistic, and serene," she insists, while "Anglo-Saxon women tend to wax angry, energetic, and political." ¹ Ladimer implicitly engages Courtivron's clear-cut distinction between the two cultures--French femininity and American feminism--and deliberately blurs it, concluding that the models presented by these French women and their writing are in fact feminist.

Ladimer asks not only how gender affects aging but also how aging affects gender. She reads these women's lives and their work together, showing how their writing often served as a space for working through anxieties about aging and rehearsing new ways of living. She concludes that all three developed a style in their later works that reflects resolution of earlier concerns, if not obsessions. Most important, all three lived their last years neither pathetically alone nor fiercely independent but in the intimate company of others in ways that came as a welcome surprise to them. Key to their ability to draw others close was their turn to autobiography, which became a preferred genre for them. "It is this shift into a more authentic mode of self-description," Ladimer writes, "that gives autobiography a potentially more subversive role for older women than it has had for older men and may be the reason autobiography has been such a frequent practice among older women writers in all languages in the twentieth century" (44). Autobiography privileges disclosure, which reveals one's vulnerabilities and therefore, Ladimer believes, presumes a relationship of trust with the reader. Thus autobiography is seen as a space for practicing the development of trusting relationships with intimates.

For much of their lives, Colette, Beauvoir, and Duras had lived against "the pitiable plot" of patriarchy, asserting their independence from the heterosexual norms of society (13). But in their final years, they came to accept their dependence upon others, a dependence that Ladimer understands as a new form of femininity, one made possible in part by accepting the process of aging itself. These three creative women possessed, of course, the power conferred by their literary status. But, while Ladimer recognizes this, she underlines the transformations--in their writing and in their lives--that characterized their old age. The passage is from independence to dependence, with intimacy lived out in unexpected ways. For the last six years of her life, Duras lived with Yann Andrea, who was thirty-nine years her junior and gay. Their relationship was intense, and he helped her through her harrowing treatment for alcoholism. Beauvoir formed an intimate friendship with Sylvie Le Bon, a former student of hers who was thirty-three years younger. And Colette maintained a close relationship with her third husband, Maurice Goudeket, who was also much younger than she, even while she insisted that their relationship not be a sexual one. Smart women, I would say. As we know, on the average women outlive men some seven years.

Ladimer's conclusions are bold, but her tone is temperate and even. Her book is a model of careful...